So the fastest growing “religion” in Minnesota and the country is “Nones,” the Star Tribune reports. In reading this article, I was struck by the interviewees’ infantile understandings of religion and Faith. L.P. said that “[she] can’t imagine that only one religion has access to the pearly gates,” said Lisa Pool, explaining her church breakup after class ended. “I realized there are all kinds of different paths to being a good person.” [Let’s ignore L.P.’s probably snide reference to “the pearly gates” and analyze her thoughts. First, L.P. does not understand that the goal of life is not to “be a good person.” The goal of life is to glorify God and reach salvation. And if the goal of life was to be a Good Person™, L.P. must admit that either (i) there is no definition of “Good,” so each person (Hitler) is good if he acts in accordance with what he believes is good or (ii) there is an objective reality stemming from some universal truths indelibly written on the heart of each human. Second, L.P. alludes to the oft-cited complaint with religions that they each deny that other faiths provide a path to salvation. But L.P. is wrong: for example, the Catholic Catechism…Continue reading “Nones”
Category: Catholicism
Prayer on a (bonus) Father’s Day
I am writing this at 5 a.m. on the day before my first Father’s Day as a dad. My daughter is swaddled up, sleeping on my desk after her 4 a.m. bottle. It’s raining outside. I am not a birthday guy. Never have been. Growing up, I always felt an odd sense of guilt on my birthdays. I didn’t like the spotlight. I didn’t want the attention. Our time on earth is limited, and a birthday marks another year gone. Even as a child I felt an overwhelming sense that we have so little time on earth and there’s so much to do. Birthdays are a reminder or our mortality. I’ve always been a bit skeptical of people who actually cared about or, worse yet, celebrated their birthdays. And yet, I am proud to say it: I am so excited for Father’s Day tomorrow. Not for a gift or to play golf. No, but to actually be a father on Father’s Day. My dad once said that he felt, growing up, that he was born to be a father. He didn’t mean it in a boastful way. He saw fatherhood as a vocation, not a check-in-the-box. I felt and feel the same way.…Continue reading Prayer on a (bonus) Father’s Day
Skin in the game
My wife and I finally left the hospital with our baby after she spent 21 days in the special care unit. Twenty-one days of being poked and prodded. Twenty-one days of a feeding tube. Twenty-one days of being hooked up to loud, beeping machines. And 21 days not at home. Twenty-one days of tears leaving the hospital. Twenty-one days of uncertainty and fear. And then suddenly we got to take her home. And the 21 days doesn’t seem so bad anymore. Carrying our baby out of that hospital in a car seat was one of the best two or three moments of my life. I felt freer than I ever have in my life while also weighed down with the solemn burden of fatherhood. I know some people spend their whole life talking about the “good old days” and reminiscing about a time when they were younger, but not me. All I can think about is the here and now and the future! My little girl’s future. My daughter will, inshahallah, live until the year 2100. 2100. It’s only 2018. Eighty-two years ago it was 1936. World War II hadn’t even happened yet. Today’s day in age it can be tempting to…Continue reading Skin in the game
Contradiction
Hmmm… Russel Berger’s great sin against secularism? For posterity’s sake, the Left in 2018: They forgot the asterisk on that bottom tweet–*unless your ideas or beliefs are too diverse as we define it, in which case . . . you’re fired!”
A worthwhile read on America’s opium crisis
***I drafted this post and let it sit for a few weeks. In the interim, a family friend traveled off to funerals for two brothers, both dead of overdoses within two weeks of each other. The boys’ parents are now childless.*** I am very interested in the opium crisis in America. Particularly, I am interested in the crisis’s effects on the American Way–our institutions and communities–felt most acutely in our nation’s small towns and suburban areas. My wife and I have both been touched by the crisis in the past few years as we’ve each had a twenty-something family friend overdose on heroin. Both of these young men had good parents, upper class upbringings. and intelligence. These kids had all the chances and love in the world going their way and still could not overcome their addictions. This has kept me thinking that opiate addiction must be intensely powerful. For this reason, my wife refuses painkillers, and I’ve adopted that position as my own. In my thoughts about the opium crisis, I wonder if it could be that–instead of addiction causing many of society’s problem–opiate addiction is the effect of more widespread problems? I’ve been thinking it’s probably no surprise that…Continue reading A worthwhile read on America’s opium crisis
No cowards here, just promises
This week, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens advocated a Second Amendment repeal. And we, as Americans (both gun-owning and non-gun owning), must remember and cherish the moral underpinnings of our right to arms. I tire of Second Amendment advocates relying on hunting to provide the basis for our right. Hunting is a fun activity and provides a palatable, unobjectionable-at-a-dinner-party rationale for our right to arms, but it is entirely inadequate as a justification for private gun ownership. Our right to bear arms is a basic human right, not one granted to us by the Constitution. The Constitution, n its face, accepts this: the Second Amendment does not grant us the right to bear arms, instead the Second Amendment (as all of the Bill of Rights) mandates that the government not infringe on that right. The right predates and supersedes the Constitution, our government, politicians, etc. “[T]he right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” Jeffrey R. Snyder’s A Nation of Cowards (link to full text, apparently with author’s consent) provides a wonderful primer on these ideas. Below I provide some excerpts. Here is a link to a complete audio reading by one of…Continue reading No cowards here, just promises
Lenten post-lift breakfast
It’s Ash Wednesday today, so Catholics fast from meat. Doesn’t mean I skimp on my post-workout protein. Here’s my break-fast today. Get it? Fast-break. Breakfast. Looks gross. That’s .75 cup oatmeal, two cans of tuna, and broccoli. The whole meal is just 405 calories and has 47.5 grams of protein, 40.5 grams of carbs, and 7 grams of fat.
Profiles in courage: Fr. Ben Morin, S.J. (Lieutenant U.S. Army)
It’s late December 1941–the first fortnight of the U.S.’s involvement in the Second World War. You’re a 21-year old tank platoon commander. Just four weeks earlier, you and your men arrived in the Philippines. When you arrived, complacency ruled. American military members concerned themselves more with nightlife and parties than fighting the Japanese. Now a short month later, you’re at war. The Japanese have landed and are bearing down on your position as American and Filipino forces withdraw all around. Your whole tank company unit is running out of fuel. Someone needs to stop–or at least slow down–the advancing Japanese to facilitate the withdrawal. Your commanding officer informs higher echelon commanders that his company will pool its remaining fuel and that you will be taking your platoon of five tanks into the Japanese force’s teeth to buy the main body more time. Such was the position Ben Morin of Maywood, Illinois found himself in on December 22, 1941. A child of the Great Depression, Morin enlisted in the Army as a high school senior in 1938. By late ’41, he had been selected as an officer and given command his platoon. On December 22 of that year, Morin’s tank platoon…Continue reading Profiles in courage: Fr. Ben Morin, S.J. (Lieutenant U.S. Army)
An Independence Day homily on simplicity and eternity
The longtime pastor at my church retired a few years ago. The new pastor is a wonderful man I’ve grown fond of and close to. The old pastor still occasionally says mass. Two weeks ago, his homily struck me with a force that rarely occurs to me. Short on deep theology but long on meaning, I asked him for a copy–which I’ve posted below. I think the homily was especially meaningful as I move through an increasingly stressful and busy season of life. I am obsessed with the idea of simplifying (in everything), but I nonetheless continue to overcomplicate life…as time marches on. Here’s the text of the homily: “Tis a Blessing to Be Simple” At about the time America was becoming a nation, a small religious movement, the Shakers, was coming to these shores. If you know about the Shakers, you may feel some of their ideas were odd. But they got one thing very right; they believed in being simple. They produced furniture that is still imitated today because of its elegant simplicity. So, too, with their poetry and their music; they had a genius for finding the beauty that dwells in simplicity. The hymn for which they…Continue reading An Independence Day homily on simplicity and eternity